Alexander L. Francis

Research Interests / Training Areas:

Speech perception

Cognitive aging

Listening effort

Psychophysiology

Biography:

I earned my B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991, completing one semester of study in Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. I did my graduate work at the University of Chicago, earning an M.A. in Linguistics in 1993 and a dual Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and Linguistics in 1999. I completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, and have been at Purdue since 2002.

I study speech perception, acoustic phonetics and cognitive hearing science, with a particular interest in the role of cognitive mechanisms in understanding speech under challenging conditions. My recent work has focused on cross-language, second language and accented speech perception, and speech perception by older listeners with and without hearing impairment. I have also studied the production, perception and learning of Cantonese lexical tones, and factors contributing to the intelligibility of synthetic speech.

Lin, M. & Francis, A.L. (2014). Effects of language experience and expectations on attention to consonants and tones in English and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 136(5), 2827-2838